This drive is received under the Vine program, but I try to rate it as if I bought it at its current price. I own a number of external drives, including a 200GB Maxtor Firewire bought 6 to 7 years ago (still functional) and a number of removable drives (ranging from 320GB through 1.5TB) that connects through eSATA.

Pros:

Comes with USB 3.0 cableRelatively quiet (especially when no read/write activity), coolSpins down when not connected, or after 30 minutes of no activityPower adapter can handle international voltage (100-240V, 50/60Hz)Preformatted in NTFSLots of space!

Cons:

Not very stable, easy to knock overRequires USB 3.0 cable, may be hard to findFairly bad performance on USB 2.0Bulky, requires power adapter (but that’s the same for everything near this capacity)No hardware encryption – if you want to secure your files, use something like TrueCrypt

Let me start off by saying that, if you don’t have USB 3.0 on your computer, get a USB 2.0 drive instead for less money. The performance of this one on USB 2.0 is pretty lackluster (see below for numbers). You sacrifice some convenience with a USB 3.0 drive – you need a USB 3.0 cable since the connector on the drive is a mini USB 3.0. Although the drive works perfectly on a USB 2.0 computer (which is what I tested on), you need the USB 3.0 cable, which is harder to find and more expensive.

The package is fairly simple. The drive, a USB 3.0 cable and a power adapter. The adapter does work with international voltage (100-240V, 50/60Hz) if you plan to travel with it – you’ll need adapters for different countries, of course, since this has a 2 prong ungrounded US style adapter. There’s also a quick install guide that should not be necessary. Software is on the drive, but I did not check it out. According to the documentation, in its default setting, it will back up your computer’s drive.

The drive is designed to be placed vertically. The front and side surfaces are glossy plastic. The top, bottom and back have ventilation holes. It does not look designed to be placed on its side, which is a pity because vertically it is not stable. If you get some small rubber feet and stick it to the right side (the cables are close to this side), you can use it horizontally without worrying about it sliding around.

In operation, the drive is fairly quiet. I can just make out the sound of the drive spinning in a quiet room when it is 2 feet away from my head. When reading or writing, there is a louder clicking sound. A blue LED flashes to indicate disk activity, stays on when the drive is idle, and flashes slowly when the drive is in power savings mode.

Which brings me to what I like about this drive. After you disconnect the drive from the computer physically, or if it is idle for 30 minutes, the drive will spin down. Note that my system is set to never spin hard disks down, so this is something built into the drive or controller, not a setting on my system. If you “safely remove” the drive from your computer, it might or might not spin down immediately depending on your system. It does not on my desktop, but it does on my laptop.

The downside to having it spin down is that there is a 10 second delay when accessing the drive after it has spun down.

I did not open it up to take a look, but I believe this to be some variant of the Western Digital Green 5400 rpm drive. The surprising thing is that the retail price of this drive is lower than the price of a bare 3 TB drive. Transfer speed is nothing to get excited over. I copied about 900 images (11685 MB) from my local hard disk over to this drive, and it took about 11 minutes. Calculated it is slightly above 140 Mbps, or 17.7 MB/s. That’s well below what USB 2.0 is capable of, let alone USB 3.0 (which should be able to copy files at around 400 MB/s after taking into account protocol overhead).

Why so slow? I’m copying a bunch of relatively small files, from hard disk. If I’m to use a benchmarking program, I’m sure I would get higher numbers. But considering the purpose of this drive is for backing up, I’d say mine is a more realistic test.

I tested this again connected to USB 3.0. This time, I’m copying a bunch of large files (about 2GB to 4GB video files). I have a throughput of around 70 MB/s. Using this on a USB 3.0 capable system will indeed save you quite a lot of time.

I’m fairly price sensitive when it comes to hard drives, since I buy a lot of them. This one is fairly reasonably priced, but I would definitely have bought a USB 2 version instead, and probably a 1.5TB or 2TB drive if they cost less $ per GB. Being the largest USB 3.0 drive available, this one is surprisingly inexpensive. I will probably connect this one to my router to make it into a NAS, since it can spin down to save power.

Easy plug and play to my new Windows 7 PC. No problem connecting to 3.0 USB. Easy configuration set up. Works great behind the scenes with several back ups. No issues so far in the first few weeks of use.

This unit does what it says it will, but v-e-r-y slowly. The USB 3.0 data speed transference claim is an outright joke. Don’t expect speeds anywhere near 3.0.

Also, be careful to safely remove the drive if using on another computer. Failure to do so results in corrupting the partion it installs, requiring reformatting the drive and wiping everything on it (including the internal back up software it comes with). The software then has to be downloaded from the HP site.

Incidentally, HP support is clueless when it comes to troubleshooting anything but laptops and desktops. They told me to call Western Digital support (the actual manufacturer of this drive, albeit branded as ‘HP’). They were very competent in resolving issues associated with the drive.

Finally, why in the hell doesn’t this unit have an enternet port like other Western Digital externals so it can be used as a Network drive?!

Bottom Line: Save yourself the trouble and get a Western Digital unit instead.

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